Tuesday, November 22, 2011

I always hated trying to navigate the SBL
paper catalog and when it's an AAR-SBL catalog, it's even worse. When
you get to the annual meeting, you do get a condensed version, and that
is more helpful, but this year marked the first time that a mobile app
(iOS and Android) was available for the meeting. It was quite handy. It
could be updated with latest changes. You could look through the
meeting lists and add ones to "My Schedule" which made it easy to see
when and where to go and see time conflicts. It included maps and lists
of exhibitors. For both meetings and the exhibit hall, there was a great
little locator link showing you where to go. If a meeting had any extra
information attached to it (info on speakers or abstracts of
presentations), that was available too. You could even attach notes to
meetings within the app. There was even an included Twitter feed
(#sblaar). All great stuff! Downsides? It was a bit slow and sometimes
would freeze on my Droid X. The calendaring part would always start at
Thursday rather than the day/time where you last were looking. I also
couldn't find any way to export My Schedule (e.g., to Outlook or Google
Calendar) or to add an appointment that wasn't a meeting to My Schedule.
Still, a very handy app, and I strongly encourage AAR-SBL to offer it
again next year.